Posts tagged: PR

It’s a big day for the Foreworld Saga. The Mongoliad: Book Three is out, rounding out the adventure story that began last year. This is a big one, nearly as long as the previous two volumes put together.

Also, Seer—the latest of the SideQuests—is out today as well. This time, we follow Andreas on an adventure in the Pyrenees shortly before the events of The Mongoliad.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busily prepping a bunch of PR material. Here’s a quick list of those articles and where you can find them.

We love gallows humor — the darker the better. Bonus points if you have the presence of mind to wisecrack in the face of certain death. You may recall this most excellent exchange on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae:

Native of Trachis: “The Persian arrows are so numerous they block out the sun!”

Spartan Dienekes: “Good. Then we will fight in the shade.”

It’s not that we make light of situations we “can’t handle”. Rather we are accepting the challenge while giving fate the finger. Gallows humor is a perfectly legit tool for dealing with death, divorce, and all manner of dereliction – even addiction.

There’s a quote in an old fighting manuscript from the fifteenth century fencing master Fiore de Liberi that my first instructor liked to drill into me over and over and over. It goes, roughly; “Train slow, because anger will give you speed in the fight.” My first teacher drilled me with it so often because like any enthusiastic student with a sharp, pointy thing in his hand, I was prone to energetically trying to replicate what he was showing me at light-speed. That’s not really conducive to learning how to do anything properly. Learning any sort of physical motion effectively requires you to calm down and understand the pieces of the movement, then practice them until they’re programmed into muscle memory, then you should be able to replicate it effectively when you’re in the adrenaline-driven insanity of fight or flight mode. It’s also a good way to avoid cutting your own ear off.

There is another lesson I took from this quote, however: Sword fighting, and its pursuit, is about passion.

BR: The thing that most impresses me with The Mongoliad is that you guys have made the Mongols and the Shield-Brethren sympathetic and interesting characters. Was this a conscious decision or a result of writing in groups?

CM: Thanks for the compliment – this was a conscious effort. History is written by the winners. No doubt the Mongols felt they were destined to rule the globe, just as every other world power thinks at some point. To write something more interesting than basic “black hats vs. white hats” or “east vs. west,” we needed fully developed characters on both sides. This way the reader gets invested in both story lines and has to wrestle with their own internal conflict at the end of the series.

To be honest, my “difference” was only partly about gender; it was equally that I was not practicing Western Martial Arts with them, that I was 3000 miles away and had never met any of them in person for the first 6 months I was involved. Even when I went out there and we all worked in the same room together, the difference was less about male-vs-female and more about tone, specifically martial-vs-anything-other-than-martial. The guys created the project specifically IN ORDER TO write the martial-prowess material. For me, those bits are a lot of work, but relationship-oriented scenes, especially involving humor, come naturally.

Nicole also offers a piece on the delightful inventiveness of secret histories [via Suvudu].

After staring at a blank piece of paper for quite a while, I decided there wasn’t much of a difference. History is full of secrets, so what does it matter if the secrets of any given story are far-fetched or not? I was ready to argue that The Mongoliad is every bit as “truthful” as any historical novel you’ll ever read. (In some ways, more so, because we’re honest about how much reality we are inventing.)

Then I realized that such thinking is a terrible disservice to the magic inherent in “secret history.” I don’t mean that a secret itself has to do with magic – there is no overt magic in The Mongoliad, for example (although Book 3 hints at certain mysteries to come). It is the very existence of a secret – any secret, really – that opens the trapdoor for magic to slink in.

Wildly inaccurate portrayals of sword fighting in the media are nothing new. Recently John Clements dropped by io9 to debunk modern sword fighting, and Martin Page and Guy Windsor talked to IGN about the problems with sword fighting in video games. These guys know sword fighting. Me? I’m just a writer, trying not to embarrass himself on the page when it comes to a bit of the hack and slash. I’m the showrunner for The Foreworld Saga, a secret history of the Western martial arts, and one of the writers of The Mongoliad. I’ve been party to writing a few sword fights, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: they are an incredible pain in the ass to write.

UPDATE: Joe and Cooper interview each other for Fade into Fantasy [link].

Cooper: This sword-fighting group eventually included most of the authors for The Mongoliad – including you, obviously – and the rest is history. Alternative history, in fact. So the answer to the question how did I come to be an author on The Mongoliad is — writing & fighting. And blind-ass luck.

In 2004 I joined a fight club. It was more of a sword-geek guild, really. We met every Sunday morning in a nondescript warehouse in Seattle’s industrial district, made our own weapons, and fought with them. It was gloriously homegrown and savage. Olympic fencing this was not.

We beat the hell out of one another every Sunday, went to work bruised and bleeding on Monday, and came back the following Sunday to do it all over again. This went on for almost two wonderful years until, one fateful day, Neal—one of our founding members—had some bad new for us.

Part of our purview on the project, an interactive story that’s being turned into a book trilogy, was to portray Western martial arts correctly. Thus began my crash course in the evolution of arms and armor over several centuries of medieval life.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this education was charting the changes that occurred as a result of this medieval arms race. Let’s start with the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, as recorded by the Bayeaux Tapestry, which is more than 200 linear feet of embroidered pictures of men in armor.

A little insight into the workings of the writers’ room [ Full piece @ tor.com ]

I like to joke that ninety percent of my job is herding cats, and there’s a little cry for help in that joke. Because really? Keeping a room full of writers on task is EXACTLY like herding cats; it’s only worse in the sense that a great deal of the magic of a writers’ room only happens when your cats have gone and gotten very distracted. Writers, as solitary thinkers, tend to spin stories out of nothing but moonbeams and cobwebs and whatever the latest Internet meme is that is keeping them from doing pay work. You put a bunch of them in a room, and the story generation becomes exponential. In many ways, the easiest part of managing The Mongoliad was letting the ideas in the room run unhindered.

Joe Brassey talks about the origins of the Circus Branch [ Full piece @ suvudu.com ]

Three days earlier, and I’m in the meeting where I got this assignment. The upstairs office is a big room with a big, long table at its centerpiece. A pink box of doughnuts and pastries sit in the center, and various books on the Mongol Empire, medieval fighting techniques, and the events of 1241 are scattered here and there. My laptop is humming along as I try to keep pace with the jokes and the story-plotting that’s thrumming along as seven writers plus a few other brain-storming minds toss out ideas. Words fly left and right as our Canon Master Mark Teppo attempts the admirable and unenviable task of herding a bunch of inquisitive minds like cats fighting over a piece of string and keeping us all on task. That’s important today because he’s bringing up a point that is going to change our course a bit. Up until now The Mongoliad has consisted of three branches of story weaving together. In meeting cadence, they’re called the Brethren Branch, the Mongol Branch, and the Rome Branch. Mark is about to turn that all upside down.

Here’s the thing: I understand labels. I understand genre marketing. I get that people like to put things in neat little boxes so that they know how to approach them. I also started off my career writing “urban fantasy” books that don’t have werewolves, vampires, or the undead in them. I call the Codex books “occult noir” and no one understands what I’m saying; I say “urban fantasy” and we have, at least, a general starting point.

For a moment, then, let’s consider this claim that The Mongoliad is an epic fantasy. What’s epic about it is the amount of research we did. We wanted to write a Western martial arts adventure story, one that was true to the actual fighting techniques of the time. Fighting techniques that are, only now, being rediscovered and taught in martial arts schools around the world. You know what? There’s a lot more to fighting with a sword than simply hitting the other guy first.

And, finally, here are a few of things that have been said about the previous volumes.

“An outstanding historical epic with exceptional character development and vivid world building… In addition to the heroic battles–including swordfights, archery, wrestling, and martial arts–romance, political intrigue, and promises of betrayal and rebellion are suffused throughout this cinematic tale…Stephenson and Bear & co. have set the bar high for the series.” – Publishers Weekly

“Story lines abound but interconnecting them all is the fascinating evolution of sword fighting… sf and military-history buffs will devour this genre-bending saga.” – Booklist

“This off-beat alternate history of Eurasia could be your new obsession.” – io9

“Stephenson’s knack for dense historical detail combines with lots of sword-swinging adventure…As it stands, the book itself is a romp through this thinly fictional historic period, one that is full of well-described swordplay and richly imagined characters. The transitions between the voices…is seamless. The Mongoliad: Book One feels like the start of a truly epic adventure.” – Locus Magazine

“The pacing is taut throughout…the fight scenes in particular are written exceptionally well, with a clarity and subtlety missing from just about every other representation of medieval warfare in prose or on film. The authors have clearly done their homework on the period, but they wear their collective education lightly; the result is a world with depth and texture, not a history textbook.” – Tor.com

“Recommended for readers of alternate history and military fantasy‚
and fans of Stephenson.” – Library Journal

“…A collaborative epic unlike any other that will enthrall fans of fantasy, martial arts, and historical fiction.” – SF Signal

“This story is pure adventure, with much swordplay and swashbuckling.” – Kirkus Reviews